Stella Maris

By 1996 Einstürzende Neubauten had spent sixteen years building music out of things that were not supposed to make music. Formed in West Berlin on April 1, 1980 — the band have always insisted the date was not a joke — Blixa Bargeld and N.U. Unruh began performing with drills, steel girders, scaffolding pipes, and anything else the industrial ruins of divided Berlin had to offer. The name translates as "Collapsing New Buildings." The music was frequently described as noise, which missed the point: it was always composition, always structured, always more interested in beauty than its detractors wanted to admit.

Stella Maris — Latin for "Star of the Sea," a traditional title of the Virgin Mary — is the song that made that beauty undeniable. From their seventh studio album Ende Neu, it pairs Bargeld's weathered baritone with the voice of actress and singer Meret Becker in a duet that is simultaneously ancient and entirely contemporary. The arrangement is spare: a pulse, some texture, the two voices moving around each other without quite touching. Brainwashed magazine named it Single of the Year for 1996. It was the last album to feature founding member F.M. Einheit, whose departure marked the end of the band's most confrontational period. Ende Neu — "ending new," a wordplay on the band's own name — knew exactly what it was saying.

Einstürzende Neubauten have never stopped. They were among the first major acts to fund an album directly through internet supporters — in 2002, before crowdfunding had a name — and have released work consistently ever since. Bargeld simultaneously spent years as the lead guitarist of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, an association that lasted from 1983 to 2003. Stella Maris sits at the exact midpoint of their catalog: after the noise and before the increasingly orchestral work that followed. It is the moment the band stopped needing to prove anything and simply made something beautiful.